KySat

04/22/2010

A business school might seem like an unlikely source for this kind of news, but apparently packing up our troublesdoes help us get past unwelcome events, according to research from the Rotman School of Management.

A new study... suggests you might want to stick something
related to your disappointment in a box or envelope if you want to feel
better. In four separate experiments researchers found that the physical
act of enclosing materials related to an unpleasant experience, such as
a written recollection about it, improved people's negative feelings
towards the event and created psychological closure. Enclosing materials
unrelated to the experience did not work as well....

While the market
implications might not be immediately obvious..., the
findings point to new angles on such things as fast pick-up courier
services and pre-paid mortgage deals that relieve people's sense of debt
burden. If people realize that the memory of past events or tasks can
be distracting, perhaps there is a market for products and services that
can enclose or take away memories of that task.

02/26/2009

Kepler, which will focus for three years on the Cygnus-Lyra region of the Milky Way with the goal of locating potential Earth-like planets, is set to launch in the coming week. Needless to say the find of a planet in the habitable zone of another star could startle.

But a recent CNN article points out perhaps it shouldn't come as too big a surprise.

12/26/2008

Giving a 19 minute Cliffs Notes version of his book, "Fabric of the Cosmos," theorist Brian Greene explains in this Ted Talk the the basic ideas and history behind string theory, which could at long last unite relativity and particle physics in one comprehensive description of the world. Of interest to the amateur and science enthusiast like me, he uses one particularly effective illustration to answer the obvious question: "If there are more than three dimensions of space, why don't we see them?"

I have one small quibble though. A truly complete theory of the physical world will also incorporate the human analog to the "fundamental, uncuttable constituents of the matter" Greene and other string theorists pursue: the first-person experience. The relentless scrub-scrubbing of hydrogen atoms over 13.6 billion years or so has produced a being capable of pondering its own existence. Sentience, so far, has resisted division and the question "what's it like to be you?", full disclosure.

12/23/2008

Being smart enough to handle the cognitive tasks in any professional field - be it engineering, architecture or medicine - is a non-negotiable requirement for success. But it's only a start. Discussing Malcolm Gladwell's book "Outliers: The Story of Success," Daniel Goleman says that social and emotional intelligence is a potent indicator of success. And moreover, it can be taught:

This is good news for anyone who would like to see success in life shared widely, rather than given to a lucky few who happen to be born into a fortunate, charmed set of circumstances. One way to give every child a greater chance for career success – and a good life in general – would be to have curricula in social and emotional learning (see www.casel.org) a standard part of schooling. Data shows that children who are systematically taught social and emotional skills like how to manage their distressing emotions better, empathize and collaborate do better: have fewer problems like substance abuse and violence, like school more and pay more attention in class – and score significantly better (11%, on average) on academic achievement test scores.

12/05/2008

CNN is running a feature story on the "Internet of Things," the near-future when the physical world will be networked in much the same way as text, sound and imagery is now. "Hardlinking" from the physical to the virtual will take knowing in the arts, science and commerce to lands as yet unknown, though you might be surprised at one inhabitant that has already made the leap. CNN:

Bruce Sterling, one of the pioneers of cyberpunk literature in the 1980s and an active sci-fi guru, neologized the term 'spime' in 2004 to refer to any object that can define itself in terms of both space and time, i.e. using GPS to locate itself and RFID to trace its own history.

'Whatever a Web page can do, so can a pair of shoes,' says rafi Haladjian, the visionary co-founder of Violet.

So, in this case, can a rabbit.

When I'm not blogging, in my other life in Kentucky I live on a working farm that, thanks to a wife who adores animals, includes a menagerie of cats, dogs, cattle, horses, parakeets, guinea pigs and yes, rabbits. Believe me when I tell you that rabbits are one fertile metaphor for a pervasively networked world. You don't stand a chance.

06/19/2008

[T]he Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different.

If we create new tools and our tools in turn recreate us, what will be the lasting impact of the Internet? In The Atlantic, Nicholas Carr wonder if Google is making us stupid.

Reading.... is not an instinctive skill for human beings.
It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our
minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language
we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning
and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping
the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that
readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry
for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of
us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend
across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such
essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of
visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits
woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our
reading of books and other printed works.

Thanks to brain plasticity, adaptation to the Internet is happening at a biological level. Carr's question: How is the 'Net programming us?

04/08/2008

Dr. Robert St. Clair is a good friend and mentor of mine whose work I have followed since he taught me in graduate school. A linguist, philosopher and teacher he has written tons of stuff on language, society, metaphor, communications and countless other topics. Most of the time I agree with him, but while perusing some of his essays on metaphor and culture I came across one that, alas, I must admit perplexed me.

In his article, “Cultural Wisdom, Communication Theory and the Metaphor of Resonance”, St. Clair attempts to discuss the disadvantages of language, by asserting that authors are limited in their ability to connect with readers on a deeper level because language is limited. He says that “any theory of literary analysis which is based on linguistic structuralism has definite limitations”. Well, yes maybe. I mean who can say how many times we’ve said, “there just aren’t enough words”. Or “I can’t find the words.” I agree that sometimes it might be a hit or miss for an author. It’s one of the reasons some people loved Bridges of Madison County and why some of us said, “ehhh.” It’s why there are classics of literature that have survived centuries and why other works fade into oblivion.

But there are those moments in literature where somewhere, someone resonates with what the speaker says.

The first time I read The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver, my daughter was just a year old and I had decided she was the last. So when I got to the paragraph that describes that experience, I sobbed and told my husband (who really thought I had lost it for a moment) “You’ve got to read this paragraph!”

But the last one; the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after- oh, that’s love by a different name. She is the babe you hold in your arms for an hour after she’s gone to sleep. If you put her down in the crib, she might wake up changed and fly away. So instead you rock by the window, drinking the light from her skin, breathing her exhaled dreams. Your heart bays to the double crescent moons of closed lashes on her cheeks. She’s the one you can’t put down.

St. Clair uses the tuning fork to describe the metaphor of resonance and how some things just can’t be related through words, and I am drawn back to this moment in my literature experience that has stayed with me now for five years. My daughter is six now and I still read that paragraph with a catch in my throat. I resonate that experience; those words are like a tuning fork to my heart because my heart has been there, and I KNOW that feeling.
It’s why we continue to read; it’s why we continue to write, to create, to blog…. Because sometimes there really are enough words.

10/03/2007

One such find is The Touch Project, an Australian initiative designed "to elaborate touch as a meaning system."

I won't go all philosophical on you except to say that the study of touch is crucial to technology development, and that the human touch is indispensable to our life and well being.

Alone among the five senses it has left the head and found its way to our hands and feet, to the surface of our skin, privileging touch above all other sensations and providing us with the widest range of expression and uncounted, and perhaps, uncountable, meanings. Oh, it has power.